Amazon CEO: AI shopping agents are not yet more convenient than direct access — Fortune

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said that shopping through third-party AI agents is not yet more convenient than accessing the retailer directly. He said this during a conversation with analysts after the company released its quarterly report, Fortune reports.

Amazon’s position

According to Jassy, few customers shop using external agents because the experience is still not good enough and does not outperform going directly to the retailer. He did not mention Meta Muse directly.

About a month before this statement, Amazon blocked Meta Platforms’ Muse AI assistant from accessing its online store. In September, the company explained that such access would violate the terms of use agreed to by its customers.

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Amazon’s own assistant

Amazon is developing its own shopping agent, Alexa for shopping. Jassy said that more than 400 million customers used it over the past year, while the number of interactions with the service increased by 570% year over year. According to him, U.S. customers who use this agent spend 50% more per order than users without it.

At the same time, Meta reported rapid growth for Muse. Last week, the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that since its launch in early September, more than 10 million people in the United States and Canada have set up the assistant. Muse can connect to calendars, email, and other phone features to autonomously perform users’ tasks.

Zuckerberg named shopping as Muse’s most common use case: more than a quarter of the agent’s users turned to it for shopping, while the average purchase amount exceeded $200.